Gothic and Strange True Tales of the South

By Keven McQueen

Based on newspaper accounts from the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, many from the Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal, the bizarre incidents of the South prove that death can be both surprising and macabre. Inspired by articles from the late 1800s to the 1930s, these true tales retain their accuracy but still aim to tell a good story. The stories vary in theme from Graveyard Gossip and Murders of Egregious Atrocity to Gore Galore and Tales of the Hangman.

From body snatchings and grave robberies to disturbing murders and suicides, these happenings have the potential to inspire horror and humor equally. The ridiculous and apt final sayings attributed to the dead in the section Last Words remind you that joking about death can be a serious offense. Stealing bodies in the nineteenth century became so prevalent, because of the money that could be earned, that relatives of the deceased would spent days in cemeteries guarding their loved ones. One ingenious man from Tennessee even suggested that people fill graves with cement to prevent body snatching.

The medical expertise of physicians at the time did not include knowledge of the subtleties of supposed lifelessness; many times the presumed dead were buried alive only to wake later and attempt to claw their way out of the ground. Mourners in South Carolina had the interesting habit of decorating graves with common items, such as soap dishes, coffee cups, and cigar boxes. Some people did not respect the solemn and timely nature of memorial services: Rev. Dr. Nathanial Pridgeon of Georgia insisted on preaching his at his own funeral, and a woman in West Virginia turned her husband's tragic death date into her new wedding anniversary.

Covering occurrences from Virginia to Louisiana, North Carolina to Mississippi, these ghastly and sometimes ghostly tales are grossly entertaining and historically unique in that the collection is focused solely on unusual instances of death and dying down South. The book also includes a section listing incidents of the unbelievable phenomenon of black crowds lynching black criminals from the 1870s to the 1940s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pelican Publishing
• Release date: Mar 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781455620166

Keven McQueen

Keven McQueen was born in Richmond, Kentucky, in 1967. He has degrees in English from Berea College and Eastern Kentucky University and is a senior lecturer in composition and world literature at EKU. He has written nineteen books on history, the supernatural, historical true crime, biography and many strange topics, covering nearly every region of the United States. In addition, he has made many appearances on radio, podcasts and television. Look him up on Facebook or at kevenmcqueenstories.com.

Book preview

Gothic

and

Strange

True Tales of the South

Keven McQueen

PELOGO.TIF

PELICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY

Gretna 2015

Copyright © 2015

By Keven McQueen

All rights reserved

The word Pelican and the depiction of a pelican are

trademarks of Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., and are

registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McQueen, Keven.

Gothic and strange true tales of the south / Keven McQueen.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4556-2015-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4556-2016-6 (e-book) 1. Haunted places—Southern States. 2. Ghosts—Southern States. 3. Curiosities and wonders—Southern States. 4. Southern States.—Miscellanea. I. Title.

BF1472.U6M436 2015

975'.041—dc23

2014039636

Printed in the United States of America

Published by Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.

1000 Burmaster Street, Gretna, Louisiana 70053

To my sister-in-law, Alison McQueen,

and her daughter, Elizabeth Renee McQueen. I

wanted to write a book for Elizabeth that was full of talking flowers and flying unicorns, but this was the best I could do.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Graveyard Gossip

Chapter 2 Distinctive Demises

Chapter 3 Murders of Egregious Atrocity

Chapter 4 Tales of the Hangman

Chapter 5 Judge Lynch Presiding

Chapter 6 Gore Galore

Chapter 7 Ghost Stories: In Which the Dead Return to Communicate and Annoy Us

Chapter 8 A Ghastly Grab Bag

Chapter 9 Southern Eccentrics

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

These folks are aces with me:

Geneta Chumley; Drema Colangelo; Gaile Sheppard Dempsey; Eastern Kentucky University Department of English and Theatre; Eastern Kentucky University Interlibrary Loan Department (Stefanie Brooks; Heather Frith; Shelby Wills); Amy and Quentin Hawkins; Darrell and Swecia McQueen; Darren, Alison, and Elizabeth McQueen; Kyle and Bonnie McQueen; Michael, Lori, and Blaine McQueen and Evan Holbrook; Lee Mitchum; Mia Temple; and everyone at Pelican Publishing. Also: the Great Dispenser of Events.

This book was edited by Lee Mitchum.

Introduction

People will inevitably ask if all the stories in this book are true. The majority of them came from nineteenth-century newspapers, which often forsook strict accuracy for the sake of a good tale. Worse, they had a habit of running a story about some wonder and then not providing follow-up stories that could have clarified or debunked the earlier report. My primary newspaper source, the Louisville Courier-Journal, was more accurate than most. I have done further research to confirm the stories whenever possible, but the ultimate answer to this question must be: I dunno; I wasn’t there. Most of them undoubtedly are factual, but others should be taken with a grain of salt, especially when supernatural elements are concerned.

Some readers will protest: Hey, chumpy, why did you include Missouri stories? Don’t you know Missouri is a Midwestern state, not a Southern one? That seems to be the case at first glance, but Missouri borders Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky; it houses the Ozarks; it was the birthplace of Jesse James and Mark Twain; it was a slave state and nearly joined the Confederacy. I posed the question to the state’s government, and a spokeswoman said that Missouri is considered a Midwestern state today, but its history is more akin to that of Southern states. Therefore, I feel it is appropriate to include Missouri stories. (Plus, I had lots of good ones and I couldn’t stand not to use them.)

True Tales of the South

Strange

and

Gothic

p14.jpg

Chapter 1

Graveyard Gossip

Last Words

In an 1885 interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer, former Union general M. T. McMahon described a conversation he had with a fellow general, John Sedgwick, at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, on May 9, 1864. McMahon was worried about Confederate sharpshooters: Why, General, we have lost several officers this morning. These are telescopic rifles, and they are evidently picking out the officers. Sedgwick responded, Oh, pshaw! I don’t believe they could hit an elephant at that distance. That was the last thing Sedgwick ever said. But at least he died smiling.

Lucy Purnell of Snow Hill, Maryland, got mad after Mr. Hanson Robbins attempted some violence upon her, as the press carefully phrased it, and retaliated by attempting some violence upon him. In fact, she did more than attempt it. Purnell clubbed Robbins into insensibility with a wooden pestle, dug a grave for him, dragged him into it, and buried him. Groans issuing from underground suggested that he still numbered among the living, but Purnell walked away in disdain. She was sentenced to hang for this murder. When she stood on the scaffold one Friday in March 1868, she showed as much contempt for her own fate as she had for Robbins’. This death won’t be anything more than a horse-fly bite, she informed the crowd.

August Bucholtz of Memphis, Tennessee, recently had been shot in the leg—by whom and how, nobody knew; it was suspected he had been wounded while committing a burglary—but he kept his leg discreetly bound with a tourniquet. On the night of March 13, 1885, Bucholtz was unable to resist the lure of having a beer in a saloon. As he sipped a tall frosty one, an artery in his injured leg burst. Bucholtz remarked with admirable calm, Well, that’s the last glass of beer I’ll ever drink. He was proved correct three minutes later.

Col. George Cook and his wife, on vacation in May 1894, were making purchases in a drugstore in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Someone mentioned that someone had died at the Cooks’ hotel that very morning. Remarked the colonel in jest: Yes, a man could die here and you fellows would never know anything about it. As soon as he said it, he dropped dead of a ruptured blood vessel in the brain.

Joseph Fife was hanged in Richmond, Virginia, on August 26, 1897. His last words were spoken to Deputy Sergeant Ralston: I will send you a telegram from heaven on the fourteenth of March. Didn’t.

For murdering J. W. Davis, Dave Edwards was hanged in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on January 28, 1909. As he stood on the scaffold, he made unflattering comments about his victim: If Davis is in that part of eternity where the sinful go, I have no doubt I shall be with him in a few minutes. Davis went out of this life much as I am going. He had little time to prepare himself for the future world.

As double murderer Oscar Clyde walked to the gallows in Macon, Georgia, on December 4, 1912, he sang this sprightly toe-tapper: I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on my way.

Cemetery Squatter

The cemeteries of New Orleans are famous for their above-ground crypts. Some people take more than a touristy interest in them. In January 1879, rumors held that a certain cemetery in the city was haunted; investigators found the ghost to be John McNamara, who had been living a nocturnal existence in which he prowled the city’s outskirts and returned at dawn, vampire-like, to a three-story tomb where he lived and slept beside the crypt’s rightful occupants. It was discovered that he possessed considerable jewelry and money, presumably not his own.

Grave Robbers and Body Snatchers

Professional grave robbery was epidemic in America throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were three common reasons for lowlifes to plunder the tomb: 1) medical schools paid serious cash for cadavers brought in for use as anatomical specimens—no questions asked; 2) the dearly departed often were buried with gold fillings in their teeth, pocket watches, jewelry, and nice clothes, so any enterprising individual with a spade, mattock, bag, and nerves of galvanized steel could make a small fortune; 3) and hey, why not be a real entrepreneur and combine reasons one and two?

An exhaustive listing of professional or amateur tomb desecrations from the good old days would fill a book the size of the Chicago telephone directory. A few illustrations may be instructive. Take, for example, what nearly happened to the mortal shell of Right Reverend R. V. Whelan, Catholic bishop of the Wheeling, West Virginia, diocese. After his death in July 1874, his remains were placed in a large crypt in Mt. Calvary Cemetery. He was rumored to have been buried with several thousand dollars’ worth of jewels. It was an absurd story, but somebody believed it. On the morning of January 20, 1884, the graveyard’s sexton noticed that the vault’s outer doors had been pried open. The would-be robbers had tried and failed to crack open the stone archway. Undeterred, they attempted to dig into a corner of the vault from the outside. Again they were thwarted and finally gave up. Had they succeeded, they would have been disappointed to find that the only valuables on Whelan’s body were a ring and a golden cross. On the other hand, it was speculated that the robbers’ intention had been to take the body and hold it for ransom, which was an odious (and odiferous) crime in vogue at the time.

On the indubitably cold and gloomy night—for how could it be otherwise?—of November 22, 1879, a cemetery sexton in Nashville, Tennessee, caught Pete McFarland and Richard Jordan in the act of exhuming a body. They claimed that an unnamed man paid them fifteen cents an hour to retrieve corpses from cemeteries; it was revealed later that their patron represented the University of Tennessee’s medical department, which needed cadavers for students to dissect. Jordan tried to bribe their captor on the grounds that other sextons in the vicinity allowed them to plunder graveyards in exchange for a kickback of three dollars per body, but he refused. I must not neglect to mention that when authorities searched Jordan they found numerous human fingers (presumably bearing rings) stuffed in his coat pockets, as well as a gold watch they suspected he had abstracted from a recently made underground acquaintance. When the plunderers were arraigned before court, McFarland was released on the grounds that he had been coerced into grave robbing. Jordan was only fined twenty-five dollars and costs, body snatching being considered a misdemeanor. This slap on the grave robber’s clammy wrist was quite typical of the wimpy punishments meted out for that crime. After paying his fine, Jordan brashly stated that he expected to resume business as soon as the excitement blew over.

Richard Jordan was a small fry compared to Dr. William M. Jansen, alias Vigo Ross, a Danish immigrant who became one of the most notorious body snatchers in the American South in the late nineteenth century. I have been unable to discover if the title before his name was authentic or originated in sarcasm. Jansen reached national fame when Jennie Smith, age nineteen, died in Baltimore, Maryland, in November 1880. A few weeks after the tragedy, Jennie’s aunt had a recurring dream in which her niece’s body had been snatched. She had this nightmare three times, and superstition maintains that anything dreamed thrice is indisputably true. Uneasy family members recalled that a stranger had followed the funeral procession and stood fidgeting under a nearby tree during the ceremony. (A less melodramatic, and therefore more likely true, version of events is that Jennie’s mother visited the grave and found an article of clothing atop it that had been buried with her daughter.) In any case, the Smith family had the coffin exhumed. They found a hole in the lid and the body gone. Jansen left abruptly for Washington, D.C. The police collared him and sent him back to Baltimore, but there was no solid evidence against him and he was set free. He returned to Washington, a wise move since many Baltimoreans wanted to lynch him.

In January 1883, Jansen raided the potter’s field in Washington and made away with the fresh remains of Charles Shaw, who had been hanged for murdering his sister. The foolhardy Jansen stole the body in broad daylight and had it delivered to a medical school by nightfall. Jansen later recounted that he had been tempted to steal Shaw’s new shoes as a memento but fought off the urge. His assistant kept the coffin screws as a keepsake but had greater larceny in mind—he was supposed to split the fee with Jansen but hoggishly kept it all. Undeterred, Jansen broke into the medical school and swiped Shaw’s body off a dissecting table with the intention of making the school pay for the merchandise a second time. The raid on the college was witnessed by a Washington Post reporter whom Jansen invited along. The ghoul was caught hauling Shaw’s body in a rented carriage. Jansen served a year in prison. Upon release he revisited old haunts in Baltimore, but he was regarded with such contempt and suspicion that he went to the mining region of West Virginia.

Not in the least circumspect, Jansen openly boasted of his connections with medical schools across the country. In the winter of 1884, Jansen thumbed his nose at the law by delivering a combination lecture/exhibition in a Washington theater. The title was The Art of Body Snatching, which left the orator with little deniability. A reporter who attended described Jansen’s speech as ludicrous past description. The stage was dressed to resemble a graveyard, as in the fifth act of Hamlet. The audience permitted the resurrectionist to give his speech, at least until he put on a costume of dark overalls and, carrying a pick and spade, advance[d] toward the grave with the long, stealthy stride of the stage villain. Then the formerly respectful crowd pelted Jansen with eggs and potatoes until he escaped through a back door.

On October 12, 1884, Jansen and two accomplices were caught red-handed placing the bodies of two women in a wagon in a rural cemetery near Washington, D.C. He was held on $1,000 bail and it seemed his career was finished, but somehow he wriggled out of this tight spot. He reentered the headlines in July 1885, when a chap named Spedden, one of his confederates, confessed his ghoulish activities to the D.C. police. The cops searched Spedden’s room and found the following mildly incriminating items: a decomposing human finger wrapped in a cheery piece of red flannel inside a drawer (supposedly employed as a good-luck charm); three oversized sacks, several spades, and a length of rope with an iron hook of the sort used by grave robbers to pull merchandise from their alleged final resting places; a notebook containing cryptic entries such as one $20, two $15 apiece; and twelve men’s coats and a woman’s cloak, all suffused with the odor of dead bodies. Spedden, it appears, had learned his trade from the best in the business.

The next years brought about Jansen’s downfall. Perhaps his notoriety made it impossible for him to succeed further in a trade that required subtlety. On November 10, 1887, broke and facing starvation, Jansen blew out his brains in a flophouse on Pearl Street in New York City, the greatest ambition of his life unfulfilled: he had always wanted to steal the body of John Howard Payne, author of the song Home Sweet Home, from his permanent home sweet home in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington.

Israel Stanford was fatally injured at his job at the freight depot in Atlanta, Georgia, in January 1886. His remains were taken to Decatur, but before they were laid to rest, sexton Joe Smith called together members of the cemetery board to witness the burial in case the body ended up getting stolen later. The board members thought Smith’s action was suspicious and made a secret visit to Stanford’s grave that night. They arrived just in time to see two men drop shovels and run away. The grave was dug up and found to be Stanford-less. Sexton Smith was arrested, along with Atlanta Medical College janitor George Vaughn, who had been convicted in Marietta in December 1879 of snatching William Johnson, a prominent citizen, for which crime he had served six months in jail.

Sexton Smith had long had a side business selling the bodies he was paid to bury. Graves under his care were opened in Atlanta and Decatur. Many were empty. Friends of the late Ben Tolen, for example, found that dirt on his grave was disturbed; they were disturbed themselves when the coffin was exhumed and contained naught but air and Tolen’s clothing. Georgia had no law providing medical colleges with bodies for dissection, so schools had to get their subjects where they could. Smith and Vaughn were convicted of grave robbing on September 25 and given the full penalty of the law: a measly $1,000 fine, which the medical school officials paid.

Young Joseph Ewing had the misfortune to get murdered in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1890. Worse, he was buried in a potter’s field, the repository for unclaimed and impoverished corpses. Even worse, his unclaimed, impoverished corpse was snatched from its grave. Worse still, Ewing’s clothing—but not his body—turned up at a medical school. Worst of all, his body was found wrapped in paper and floating in a box on the Cumberland River. A fisherman made this unwanted catch of the day on May 30, 1890.

Five years later, Nashville was scandalized again when Miss Lee died at the Tennessee Industrial School. She was buried in Mill Creek Cemetery on August 20, 1895. The next day, her brothers came to put up a tombstone and found, to their outrage and horror, that some clumsy ghoul had left her burial clothing scattered around the grave. Investigation proved that the body was missing. The brothers got a warrant, and officers searched the local medical schools. The Lees did not retrieve their sister, although people who lived near a certain college claimed that when the police entered the school, the janitor sneaked out to the backyard and hid in a dark corner with the body in his arms. When the police left, he took it back inside.

Nettie Tracy was buried in Tracewell Cemetery, Parkersburg, West Virginia, on Christmas Day 1900. She was indiscreetly laid to rest wearing her best jewelry. On the night of January 26, 1901, ghouls opened her grave, smashed the coffin’s window, tore up Nettie’s clothing, and stole a brooch and two rings. The robbers didn’t even have the decency to rebury the corpse. They left the coffin open all night, and when the crime was discovered, poor Nettie had a face full of snow.

Mrs. Carl Scheerer died in St. Elmo, Tennessee, on Christmas Day 1912. She was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery at Chattanooga, but even six feet of earth could not prevent her from becoming the victim of a bizarre crime. On the night of January 18, 1913, someone with too much time on his hands unearthed her casket, removed her body, refilled the grave, and placed the corpse on the mound with her head resting on a wreath stolen from a nearby grave. There appeared to be no motive whatsoever for the exhumation.

A well-sealed limestone vault in the Ruddles Mills Cemetery near Paris, Kentucky, contained the remains of various Bourbon County pioneers. In March 1924, some unknown ghoul with no respect for history scattered the bones of the ancestors about the structure’s floor. Whoever did it had his work cut out for him, since in order to indulge in his pastime he had to pry the vault’s door ajar with a crowbar, open the stone receptacles within the vault, and then break the caskets inside the receptacles. Nothing was stolen, and nothing more appears to be known about the invader and his arcane purpose.

In a case from November 1924, a man opened a grave against his will. E. P. Dominy of Dublin, Georgia, was seized by three thugs who drove him to Orlando, Florida, where they took him to the grave of his recently deceased nineteen-year-old wife and forced him to unearth her casket. The three kidnappers were joined by several others until their ranks swelled to at least twenty, Dominy estimated. After he opened the casket and looked into her face at the mob’s behest, they pounded him like plaster to wrap up what must have been a memorable occasion. The reasons for their singular behavior went without explanation.

As may not be surprising to the reader, body snatching became so prevalent in the U.S. that armed relatives of the deceased often spent days hiding in cemeteries in case marauders showed up. As often as not, the wily resurrectionists figured out how to get to the prize anyway. Some people took extreme measures. For example, as James L. Jackson lay dying of tuberculosis in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 1885, he requested that his friends in the Gate City Guards militia become his bodyguards, in the most literal sense of the word. When Jackson was buried in Westview Cemetery, his comrades put on their uniforms, shouldered their rifles, and watched over his grave four at a time every night for a month.

It was not necessary to stand watch over loved ones’ graves as long as they were buried in such a manner that robbery was more trouble than it was worth. Levi Z. Leiter was interred in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Cemetery in June 1904. His relatives had an idea that his grave would prove attractive to pilferers, so they buried him in a metal coffin surrounded on the sides and bottom by four feet of cement. The top of the casket was buried under eight feet of the same, with railroad iron mixed in. When rumor held that a team of grave